There’s this image that big tech teams build software where everything is automated and has 100% test coverage and all the infrastructure heals itself and all teams are hyper efficient. It’s not really true, the biggest shared practice between big tech is letting the team’s manager pick whatever methodology works best for them.
The big tech version of scrum is just sprints, stand ups and shipping often. There’s still a waterfall process, mounting technical debt, huge backlogs where everything is high priority, and over committing to slipping deadlines.
I think people should think twice before looking at big tech as the place to learn good management practices from.
I think your last point is wrong. Shipping big, complex projects at big tech companies, especially vendors who actually literally ship and can't do live patching to cover up shoddy practices, is actually something _everyone_ in the industry should do because you learn a lot about what it really means to build and release software.
Cloud-delivered CRUD apps are the easy mode of SW development and people who have never done anything else really end up quite stunted IMHO.
I agree with your second point, I often read project management advice and realize it comes from consultants and agencies and small companies and doesn’t really scale for big tech or address issues with large engineering teams.
I actually agree with your first point too, I do think big tech devops and security practices should be copied.
The point I was trying to make is that I don’t think big tech management is actually that good. Big tech is optimizing for staying big (reliability, security, etc.) the famous projects are usually the most uninteresting to engineers cause they ship a handful of new features a year and you spend most of your time working on bug fixes, infrastructure updates and security patches so those projects end up having the most churn in engineers and management. Because of that churn these teams tend to adopt the practices most suited to oversight (stand ups, sprints, retrospectives, etc.) instead of the ones best fit for improving the customer experience (grooming the backlog, collecting user feedback often, etc.). So that’s why I say we shouldn’t be using big tech management practices as an example imo, cause big tech still hasn’t decided on a solution to the problem of slipping deadlines, exploding backlogs and insurmountable technical debt.
The big tech version of scrum is just sprints, stand ups and shipping often. There’s still a waterfall process, mounting technical debt, huge backlogs where everything is high priority, and over committing to slipping deadlines.
I think people should think twice before looking at big tech as the place to learn good management practices from.